Posts [ 17 ]

Re: ViEmu for Word/Outlook Not Working in Word 2003

Hi.

I love ViEmu for VS, so while purchasing it online I thought adding ViEmu for Word/Outlook was a no-brainer. I was wrong.

I have installed and uninstalled the Word add-in several times now, and I cannot do any better than to see the ViEmu Settings button on the toolbar. Unfortunately, when I click this button, nothing happens. No dialog. No nothing. There is no vi/ex "colon prompt" at the bottom of the screen. Hitting Esc does nothing. Pressing the "i" key on the keyboard simply prints the letter "i." Pressing the colon key prints ":" on the page.

On checking for Word's COM Add-Ins, I see only the Microsoft Word East European Fonts Tool. If I click the Add button in the COM Add-Ins dialog and navigate to the ViEmuW installation folder and try to manually add the ViEmuW.dll file, it won't let me. I can highlight it and double-click it, but it will not add itself to the list of COM Add-Ins.

I searched through old forum posts and tried the following (to no avail):

-- Lowered Macro Security to Medium... then to Low. No dice.

-- Checked the About box --> Disabled Items. "There are no disabled items."

-- Checked the Registry for oddities. Everything looks correct.

Finally, I pressed Ctrl+Shift+Alt+V several hundred times to see if I could turn it on. Nope. Nothing. Zip and pip.

I would really like this thing to work. (BTW, I've never had ANY trouble with the Visual Studio add-in.) Can anyone help?

Re: ViEmu for Word/Outlook Not Working in Word 2003

Hello Tim,

Apologies for the problems. Word is indeed a tougher beast than Visual Studio, and in some cases it's tricky to get it to work. It's rare, but there are so many layers of complexity that it happens occasionally.

I am wondering whether either the XP or Office SP3 could have an impact. I will try installing them to verify if that could be the cause.

Also, do you have any other 3rd party Word or Outlook add-in installed? There have been cases, for example the Taglocity add-in, where the add-in changes the internal hierarchy of windows and ViEmu can't find them.

I have a ViEmu/Word&Outlook troubleshooting guide halfway completed. I will send it to you so that you can check the first steps, and we can keep on testing further things until we discover what the problem is. It will also help me complete the guide. Hopefully we can get it working in a couple of iterations. I will send you an email now with the guide as an attachment.

Don't worry about the purchase because, of course, I will refund the charge to you if we can't get it working. Also of course, I'd much rather fix it so that you can actually enjoy it!

Re: ViEmu for Word/Outlook Not Working in Word 2003

The only other plug-in I can think of is Adobe Acrobat. It wouldn't be the first time that Adobe's programmers have mucked things up.

The service packs may have thrown up some more security roadblocks. What's odd is the fact that I can see the button on the toolbar, but it doesn't seem to be hooked to anything.

Oh, yes. Just to be clear, I really want ViEmu for Word to work. My brain and hands are hardwired for vi, so this is like manna from heaven. For many years I've been using the vi emulator for Eclipse (which also works just fine with Adobe Flex Builder). I recommend it highly. It makes working inside an IDE tolerable.

My wrist tendons complain bitterly whenever I have to work with Microsoft products that force me to fly all over the keyboard to hit the arrow keys, F keys, etc. Don't even ask me about how I feel about being forced to find the mouse with my right hand all the time....

Re: ViEmu for Word/Outlook Not Working in Word 2003

xhwdave, I'm still trying to solve the issue with Tim by email. Have you checked the suggestions above? In the cases where this happens, it's often due to security issues (although, as in Tim's case, it could be something else).

Re: ViEmu for Word/Outlook Not Working in Word 2003

Re: ViEmu for Word/Outlook Not Working in Word 2003

Dave, Tim hasn't still had the time to do the tests. Are you a developer yourself too? Do you have Visual Studio installed? If so, we could try to run the test code on your system too and try to find a solution.

I'm trying to find a trial version of the Adobe Acrobat plug-in to try and install it myself. Can you please tell me the exact version of the product you are using, and whether the add-in is included with the regular Adobe Acrobat product?

Re: ViEmu for Word/Outlook Not Working in Word 2003

Re: ViEmu for Word/Outlook Not Working in Word 2003

This post has nothing to do with fixing the problem, it's just a suggestion that someone might find helpful.

If I was having this problem I would install Word in a fresh virtual machine and see if I could get that to work. If it does, I might use that solution forever.

I have done this with Visual Studio. Web projects broke on my laptop and I spent about eight hours trying to get them working again. Microsoft support didn't help and neither did a complete deinstallation and reinstallation of Visual Studio. I decided to not waste any more time and set up a virtual machine with Visual Studio for working with Web projects.

It's actually an acceptable solution, now that VMware Workstation supports multiple monitors. The speed difference is negligible between the VM and the host. I would prefer to work on Web projects on the host but using the VM is not that big a deal.

Re: ViEmu for Word/Outlook Not Working in Word 2003

zhwdave, unfortunately I haven't heard back from Tim. I don't want to annoy him either, he is a customer and I am grateful for any time he can put in to try to diagnose the issue, but of course this must be his lowest priority!

Gandalf, thanks so much for chipping in with a suggestion on how to work around this. Indeed, it is very frustrating for me when these rare cases are reported. I can't reproduce the problems, and it might be due to so many different things that's it's incredibly hard to pinpoint the issue. DLL-hell, .NET-assembly-hell, OLE/COM-library-hell, any of these issues might be the cause, and there is no simple way to diagnose why ViEmu is just not getting notified of Word events (which is what is happening).

Anyway, I understand that people want to use ViEmu in their regular Word/Outlook on their regular OS installation, and I still hope to find the real cause of the problem and some sort of solution at some point. I will post about this right here as soon as I have some news.